Date: Sun, 26 Apr 1998 13:08:16 -0700 From: Studded <Studded@san.rr.com> To: John Cavanaugh <john@bang.rain.com> Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: What does /kernel: proc: table is full mean? Message-ID: <35439430.8B6F91BC@san.rr.com> References: <199804251526.IAA01643@bang.rain.com>
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John Cavanaugh wrote: > > I have got a FreeBSD box running: > > FreeBSD bang.rain.com 2.1.0-RELEASE FreeBSD 2.1.0-RELEASE #0: Thu Dec 7 07:50:1 > 2 PST 1995 john@bang.rain.com:/a/src/sys/compile/BANG i386 > > It had been up about 250 days with no problems when suddenly out of the blue > last night I got this: > > Apr 24 21:37:54 bang /kernel: proc: table is full > Apr 24 21:38:04 bang last message repeated 14 times > Apr 24 21:38:04 bang sendmail[28488]: NOQUEUE: SYSERR(root): SMTP-MAIL: cannot f > ork: Resource temporarily unavailable > Apr 24 21:38:04 bang /kernel: proc: table is full > > At this point, I could only get a root login and when I did I couldn't > do anything (shutdown, reboot, ps, etc.) because there were "no more > processes". I had to physically reboot the machine to get it to come > back. > > It came back up fine but I was curious as to what would cause this problem. DG already described the literal cause of the problem, the process table (which is predetermined when you compile your kernel) was full. The specific reason it happened at this time (after such a long uptime) was probably a mail bomb if your log snippet is any indication. I also agree that upgrading should be a high priority, at least in part since it seems like you're using this box for mail and getting a more secure version of sendmail should be a high priority, in addition to all the other stuff that's improved since way back then. :) If you need help with the upgrade, visit http://www.freebsd.org/docs.html and check out the upgrading from source tutorial. Good luck, Doug -- *** Chief Operations Officer, DALnet IRC network *** *** Proud designer and maintainer of the world's largest Internet *** Relay Chat server with 5,328 simultaneous connections. *** Try spider.dal.net on ports 6662-4 (Powered by FreeBSD) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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